Milwaukee Trip

We had several things planned for the kids' first trip to Milwaukee:
Zoo, Discovery World, Brewers Game.

Julia likes to refer to these carotenoid-digesting birds as flaminguinos (FLAH-ming-gwee-nohs). She makes the same adjustment to penguins.

Speaking of penguinos...

I hadn't been to the Milwaukee County Zoo since I was a kid. The one thing I vividly remember was being amazed at how the peacocks just walk around like they own the place. I was glad to see the birds still rule the roost.

It's interesting that they can go into different animal enclosures at will. There was a peahen with peachicks (yes, that's the proper terminology) on the wall near the bears.

I took a lot of animal pictures, but since the main purpose of this blog is to share family pictures and happenings, I'm not going to post many of them.

Not sure what Finn's facial expression is all about or whether the big cat approves.

Discovery World is on the lake front and is part science museum, part aquarium. We did the science part in the morning and the aquarium in the afternoon.
They had several music-based exhibits around the history of music technology. Julia the guitar player needed to get next to the larger than life instrument.

I was looking for improvements from this mirror, but things went drastically wrong.

Amanda and the kids pumped the giant buttons to make the fan spin.

Julia and Finn played tic-tac-toe against each other. They picked their moves and a robot made the moves for them.

The kids each laid on a bed of nails. They laid on a platform with holes in it and then the nails came out of the holes and slowly lifted the person.

Julia looked quite competent in the driving simulation. That makes me feel better about thinking about her turning double-digits in a few weeks and approaching the age of some of those adult activities.

Finn had to go to a museum to play a video game I played as a kid. It was cool and made me feel really old at the same time.

They had an arts and crafts area where some fairly complex items could be built. Julia built a hand purse and Finn a shoulder bag.

The kids tried out the different hands-on activities that demonstrated uses different scientific principles.

We took a break and for lunch headed north along the water. There was dragonboat festival going on in the lagoon near Veteran's Park that sounded interesting.

We found something to eat and watched some of the teams rowing the long boats. Then we headed back to check out the aquarium.

Finn found a catfish that seemed to be fond of him.

Having tanks on all sides of you is always an immersive experience.

There were also exhibits to check out the insides of submarines.

The touching tanks are a good way to learn that stingrays are squishy.

The Brewers game that we attended was much more than just a baseball game. Before the game was a tailgating party for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Wisconsin to celebrate their granting of 5000 wishes over the last 30 years. We were all given blue t-shirts, with Julia's being a darker color to indicate she was a wish kid. There was a great turnout for the event and fun activities and good food.

There are hundreds of pictures from the event, found here, if you're so inclined. Here's one of Julia and me. They took a group photo of all the wish kids in attendance - you can see it here.

Though we weren't the droids they were looking for, these folks let us snap a picture with them anyway.

Julia and Finn each go their names created into a piece of art. This guy stayed really busy!

Finn had to try his strength out.

It was the first time for all of us at Miller Park and the kids' first major league baseball game. We had a good time (and the Brewers won)!